Thursday, October 12. 2017

In 1492 (Old Style calendar; Oct. 21 New Style), Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition in the present-day Bahamas. In 1870 General Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, VA, at age 63. In 1915 former President Theodore Roosevelt criticized the concept of "hyphenated Americanism," referring to US citizens who identified themselves by dual nationalities. In 1933 bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, OH, with the help of his gang, who killed the sheriff. In 1942 President Roosevelt delivered one of his "fireside chats" in which he recommended the military draft be extended to include 18- and 19-year-old men. In 1960 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a UN General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe during a dispute. In 1964 the Soviet Union launched a Voskhod 1 space capsule with a three-man crew on the first manned mission involving more than one crew member. In 1973 President Nixon nominated House minority leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president. In 1984 Brittish Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher survived an IRA bomb, which shredded her bathroom barely two minutes after she had left it. Five people were killed. In 2000 al Qaeda's suicide bomb attack on the American destroyer USS Cole killed seventeen sailors in Yemen. In 2002 a bomb set by Islamic terrorists destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.